Quill pig is another name for a porcupine. Porcupines are unattractive and unpopular, but, as animals go, and unlike eagles, elephants, and donkeys, they are reasonably harmless good neighbors that mind their own business. Here's where we can talk about being good neighbors and why it's eternally important.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Left Wing, Right Wing – Who Cares?

I’m no
conservative, but I still find it galling that people equate conservatism with
the “right wing” and with indecent political behavior. I first noticed this
phenomenon when the Iron Curtain was unraveling. I found it strange that after
hearing all my life, from conservatives and liberals alike, that communism was
a left-wing, progressive, and (from the leftists) wonderful thing, the
mainstream media were describing those who sought to take down the communist
governments as revolutionaries (or something like that) and the communists as
“conservatives.” Wait! I thought. In this country all my life the
conservatives were anticommunist! Since when did conservatives turn communist?

I got an
elbow in the rib along that line a few years ago, when the TSA brought out
their first line of security scanners – which were explicit enough that a TSA
agent who volunteered to be scanned for his training class received so much
ridicule about the size of his privy member that he assaulted a fellow trainee
in the parking lot. I was expressing my disapproval of them at work when a
coworker, a proud leftist who was OK with these scanners, said, “Libertarians –
aren’t they the ones on the extreme far right?” When I was a boy, it was the
left who used the term police state as
an insult and the right wing – think J. Edgar Hoover – who defended it as
necessary. How times have changed!

But wait!
There’s more!

A conservative friend this weekend was
talking about the movie Enemy of the
State and said that the villain, the head of some national security agency
who uses government omniscience for nefarious ends, was “an
ultra-right-winger.” Now she may have meant that that was what the film’s
producers were trying to get across, but her tone made me think she thought the
term fit. It’s true that most of the film’s heroes were young and hip, and the
villains were old and establishment, but I never thought in terms of right and
left while watching. So I was very surprised to hear a conservative – who has
no sympathy for the left and has at times accused me of leftism when I take
stands she disagrees with – call the villain ultra-right-wing.

So times
have indeed changed. When Barry Soetoro was smoking pot with the Choom Gang in
high school, he was a leftist, and it was conservatives who wanted to jail
druggies. When what anyone but perhaps a microbiologist would consider the same
person ran for President in 2004 as Barack Obama, he wore the leftist label
proudly. But now he prosecutes choomers. Is the left now anti-drug? If so, what
side are the druggies on?

In the 1970s
Augusto Pinochet was the right-wing dictator of Chile. The film Missing (produced by the left) has to do
with the extrajudicial abduction (and torture?) and killing of leftist
Americans in Chile. Now President Obama meets with a secret group to go over
his “kill list,” which is produced by another secret group using criteria that
are secret, and decides who will be the object of extrajudicial abduction,
torture, and execution. So is extrajudicial killing is right wing or left wing?
Does it make a difference?

Much more
helpful than the left wing–right wing dichotomy (or continuum) is the
voluntary-coercive test. Are you touching another person’s body or property without
that person’s informed consent? Then you’re violating that person through
coercion or deceit. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to feed the hungry
or protect the innocent or just have a good time. You’re violating that person.
It’s wrong. The end never justifies the means.

If the
church is ever to fulfill the Great Commission, she needs to abandon the
“compassionate conservatism” that makes her feel justified in coercing her
neighbors. I suppose such a view is ultra something,
but it doesn’t seem to me like it’s right wing.